Thursday, May 23, 2013

Stanford prof charged with parent abduction

An associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University has been charged with felony parent abduction after taking her three children on what authorities contend was a one-way trip to the Hawaiian Islands.

Annelise E. Barron, 44, of Palo Alto, has yet to enter a plea, but she told The Daily News the case was the product of a misunderstanding and a breakdown in communication with the two fathers.

"Why would a tenured professor at Stanford try to run away to Kauai forever?" Barron said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening. "I have a very good job. It doesn't make any sense."

Barron's full-time nanny, Sonia Audino, 34, of Sunnyvale, is also facing three counts of depriving a lawful custodian of right to custody or visitation as well as one count of child abduction.

There are many things wrong with this story. Woman has 3 kids with 2 men. Dads have no custodial rights. Mom uses a full-time nanny. A 44-year-old mom has an infant child.

I thought that the term was "child abduction", not "parent abduction".

In the movie Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin Williams plays a dad who has to disguise himself as a nanny just to see his own kids.

According to a declaration Jardetzky filed on Dec. 19 in hopes of obtaining sole custody of his children, Barron's hasty departure was fueled by fears that "apocalyptic changes in the world" would occur on Dec. 21.

Authorities soon learned that Barron and Audino had taken the children to Kauai. Emails obtained by police also indicated Barron was arranging to have personal property and her car shipped to the island.

Barron and Audino were subsequently arrested on Christmas Eve and extradited to California slightly more than two weeks later. Bail was initially set at $500,000 but Barron's was dropped to $100,000 and Audino's to $55,000. Both women are out of custody.

Now this is strange. She is apparently a respected professor with her own research lab of about 20 people at Stanford. Smart people do get sucked in by bizarre theories, sometimes, but I would not expect a Stanford professor to move to Hawaii because of the ancient Mayan calendar.

Barron also said her inquiries about having personal property and her car shipped to Kauai were related to a sabbatical she was hoping to spend at the Hawaii Institute of Unified Physics. She said she is friends with its controversial director of research, Nassim Haramein.

But Barron said she understood why her actions were concerning to authorities and the fathers of her children.
"Obviously, I made mistakes in terms of leaving my phone off and not communicating better with the children's fathers," Barron said. "I hope to clear up this misunderstanding and move on with my life and my research."

In the meantime, Barron's infant son is in Butler's custody and her other two children are staying with Jardetzky's older brother and sister-in-law. Barron, who has been ordered to wear a GPS-monitoring anklet, said the court has allowed her to have regular supervised visits.

Haramein is not just controversial, he is a kook and a charlatan on the academic fringe. Here is a recent claim:

Haramein's work indicates everything in the universe is connected, from the largest to the smallest scale, through a unified understanding of gravity. He demonstrates that it is the space that defines matter and not matter that defines space.

"Remember that matter is made up of 99.9 percent space," Haramein said. "Quantum field theory states that the structure of spacetime itself, at the extremely small level, vibrates with tremendous intensity. If we were to extract even a small percentage of all the energy held within the vibrations present in the space inside your little finger, it would represent enough energy to supply the world's needs for hundreds of years. This new discovery has the potential to open up access and harness that energy like never before, which would revolutionize life as we know it today." ...

Less than a month after Haramein sent his paper to the Library of Congress, ...

Haramein's approach could potentially unlock new discoveries in the areas of energy, transportation and even space travel.

This is all nonsense. No real physicist sends his paper to the Library of Congress.

This will be an interesting case to watch. Either the authorities know more than they are telling us, or they have overreacted to a minor dispute. Either way, publicity throws light on a crazy system. Somehow it was okay for this professor to gain sole custody so the kids can be raised by a nanny, but not okay for her to spontaneously fly to Hawaii to see some New Age guru. Maybe she will turn out to be a psychopath, and the nanny will turn out to be a lesbian lover. There could be 18 years of litigation coming out of this story.

A Stanford bioengineering professor, kidnaps her children to a vacation destination in the US with her Nanny in tow and then gets arrested and extradited in haste over the Christmas vacation? A kidnapper on the run, with a Nanny? Somebody please call Showtime! What is really going on?

Sadly, the rest of the article only helps murk the waters and lets the estranged husband sling some mud on miss Barron with a little bit of aid from the reporter no less. Jardetzky, Barron's ex-husband describes Miss Barron of being "extremely disturbed" and of being afraid of an impeding apocalypse in a police report? Wow! stop the press! Ex-husband says former wife is nuts!

Then, the writer tells us that Barron's friends in the scientific community are "controversial" with no further clarification of to what those views are but adding by this mere comment weight to Jardetzky's remarks.

Yes, questions are unanswered, but it is a story when a Stanford professor gets arrested for kidnapping, and the newspaper is just reporting the story. And yes, Haramein is controversial.

Perhaps the ex-husband has unduly badmouthed Barron, and I believe she is innocent until proven guilty like everyone else. But the fact remains that she surely unduly badmouthed him to the court to get full custody, and then refused to give him the limited amount of visitation that the court had ordered. She may not belong in prison, but I have a hard time seeing how she could be completely innocent.

30 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I personally know Dr. Barron. She is well respected in the scientific community.

I do not think anyone should speculate or judge without knowing the whole story. Surely there is a reason why she was given full custody to begin with! It does not seem like this was a well thought out plan to run away with her children, she is too smart to make so many mistakes. Rather, I think in haste she made some bad decisions and did not communicate effectively.

Yes, there is a reason why she got full custody, and usually it is because she told lies about the dad to the court in order to deprive the child of a dad and to get more child support. I will look for more info from the newspaper, but this has gone on for 5+ months already. I try to post her side of the story, but I don't have much to go on.

From the court website, it looks like the dissolution took from 2008 to 2013. Both children have lawyers in addition to the parents' lawyers. And two relatives are also parties, presumably the brother and sister-in-law of the dad. Meanwhile this coocoo cookie captured in Kauai had another child out of wedlock so that's probably a paternity case which is not public. She'll be in Palo Alto Dept. 89 with the nanny at 9 a.m. on Thursday, May 30.

Judging from the comments to the newspaper article, everyone partied hearty in Hawaii. Chemists do know their substances and when they drink, it's always 200 proof. Bet they had a blast keeping the baby up all night while blowing smoke rings of Kauai wowie. Mo betta! Jah love.

You're absolutely right - the family court system is the wrong forum for in handling highly disputed and contested custody cases.

Practically all 50 states, family courts have done away with jury trials. WHY? Family court judges and commissioners have far too much power and zero accountability.

Compound this with wanton perjury, false allegations, subornation of perjury and a total lack of enforcement of penalties levied on parties proven to have made false statements under oath ... and you have the mess we have in what's called Family Court.

The Family Court machinery is profit driven, and not in the best interest of the child. Their continued resistance to "revokable presumptive 50/50 shared parenting" fuels this.

There was laughter and there were tears from the professor. The nanny was more composed. Another court date was set for 9 a.m. on Tuesday, June 25. The judge and what looked like the trial D.A. are both women.

Angry Dad: I appreciate the issues you bring, and I understand that you are an angry dad. However, keep in mind that truly, you are missing some very huge parts of this story; and that also, sometimes dads are angry, because they are pedophiles, who got caught and were put on supervision for two years, then got off supervision, then molested the little girl again, and got caught and put BACK on supervision AGAIN. And that meanwhile, the little girl had a vaginal injury at age 4, vaginal bleeding one month past her 7th birthday (without having started puberty), and two cases of severe bacterial vaginosis in spring 2011 and early 2012. I am sure that you are a good dad, and I hope that you are made VERY angry by a little girl's innocence being stolen, by being molested by her own father. YES, sometimes, this actually happens. It is not ALWAYS a lie, perpetrated by the mother. Please, be angry in a way that considers that sometimes, it is the dad who is the creep, not the mom. Maybe you think it's rare, but you have to admit, some men are creeps. Right? It happens. Not all men are honorable, like you are.

Oh, and by the way, a Stanford professor is paid well enough, not to even need child support; and moreover, there is just no "up side" for Dr. Barron to the negative publicity and enormous expense in family court engendered by ANY kind of accusations against a rich white-collar dad like this one (Theodore Jardetzky, like his ex-wife, is ALSO a Stanford professor--here is a pedophile, working around young people on the Stanford campus!!--and his apartment, where he is currently living, looks out over the only toddler playground in the Stanford West apartments in the faculty housing complex--not good!!!)So yeah--he's angry, because he got caught doing something very wrong. And guess what? He has pretty much gotten away with it, because sometimes, Angry Dads get angry at the wrong party...!!

Sorry George. Not ALL accusations of molest are untrue. Especially when there is outside corroboration of the molest. Perhaps you should not opine on this case unless you know the facts. I know the facts. Outside of any allegations, understand that this mother who had sole custody did not KIDNAP the children, she "deprived" the father of TWO VISITS, which, by the way, are SUPERVISED. Both fathers knew where she was going. She erred in judgement, but outside of that, she was set up...and no one can set up someone better than an angry dad.

So you are claiming that he mom refused supervised visits because she was accusing the dad of being a child molester? And the dad has not been charged with a crime? No, the mom appears to be the malicious one here.

George, prove that you are a fair person by not always assuming that women are the bad ones. Jeez, what woman hurt you, so that you assume that all women are evil and liars? This literally makes no sense. You're saying that children are never molested? Check your facts, dude. You are coming across as extremely biased and basically, in indiscriminate hater of all females, willing to throw children under the bus just to prove that men are better. Do you truly believe this? It just does not make sense.

I guess that this blog shows us what we have anyway known to be true: the era of strong, noble men who defended woman and children, based on a recognized their greater physical vulnerability and lesser access to resources of all kinds, has ended. Instead, aggression of all kinds against woman and children by men is "trendy", fashionable, celebrated, excused. This is how Jimmy Savile managed to have more than 300 young female victims and never get caught or pay the price...how Sandusky was able to victimize children for so long. It's this very sad "modern" attitude that made it possible. Chivalry is officially dead.

To answer your questions, I do not assume that all women are evil and liars. I believe people are innocent until proven guilty. I am not saying that children are never molested. I do say that molestation claims in a child custody dispute are nearly always false, and that a Stanford professor was not a threat to his kids during a supervised visitation. I see no justification for the mom's behavior, but I will happily report on her day in court.

Missed that criminal court hearing on 6/25 but noticed that the petitioner in family case 6-08-FL-000561 is Annelise E. Barron and her address is now Elmwood Complex - Women's Facility, 701 S. Abel St., Milpitas, Ca 95035. That's a different sort of "Farm" in a different corner of the county from Stanford. She probably plead guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a nanny. Postcards are best since they don't have email and the guards are highly suspicious of envelopes.

Angry Dad: This is decidedly one-sided and biased synopsis of a very unfortunate and tragic situation for all involved. You claim to believe in innocence until proven guilty; however, your selected experts and, especially, comments strongly contradict this assertion and expose your own misguided understanding. I am saddened that you think it necessary to pass judgment, condemn personal choices, and spread nothing more than gossip without having any sort of credible information or insight into an ongoing situation.

Some of the comments say she got full custody for a reason and some say she got locked up for a reason. That doesn't sound too one-sided to me! I wouldn't say it's tragic that a couple of Stanford professors got tied up in divorce court for five years -- it's pathetic!

*Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Bar Association, admitted,“Everyone knows that restraining orders and orders to vacate are granted to virtually all who apply...In many cases, allegations of abuse are now used fortactical advantage.”

•In Connecticut, attorney Arnold Rutkin charged that many judges view temporary restraining orders as a “rubber-stamping exercise” and that subsequent hearings“are usually a sham.”

•In Missouri, a survey of judges and attorneys yielded many complaints of disregard for due process and noted that allegations of domestic violence werewidely used as a “litigation strategy.”

•In Illinois, an article in the state legal journal described legalallegations of abuseas “part of the gamesmanship of divorce.”

•In California, the State Bar admits it is concerned that protective orders are “almost routinely issued by the court infamily law proceedings even when there is relatively meager evidence and usually without notice to the restrained person... it is troubling that theyappear to be sought moreand more frequently forretaliation and litigation purposes."

If this case had been in Irwin Joseph's department, she'd be back in Kauai sipping a latte and both dads would be wondering why the court wasted electricity turning on the lights in the courtroom when their visitation orders weren't going to be enforced anyway.

"Full custody mom" is looking so fetch in convict stripes and jail slippers, elegantly accessorized with handcuffs. What a mom-bites-dog story, something so unusual it almost never happens. Last time I saw a mom in chains was for refusing to pay her lawyer's bill. Expert witness gigs have dried up now, maybe permanently.

Dad's been waiting a year for a custody hearing since mom got arrested. He's stuck in supervised visitation hell, which no one on the planet knows how to get out of unless by some miracle she agrees to settle. Maybe if the brother and sister-in-law say they're sick of the brats and are sending them to an orphanage dad might have a chance.

AEB is hyper but not a bad mother. Her (not yet) ex and bf are both teaming up against her, claiming she will harm her kids. I can't believe that, but that will force the CSP and police to get involved. A single professor's salary is not enough to provide housing, childcare and a nanny for the baby. Often she has the baby and kids with her at meetings because of the lack of support. Even before the divorce proceedings and the love child, her kids were with her at lab in the evenings, not with their father. She was juggling work and childcare just like the rest of us, running through the grocery store in the evenings shopping.

George, I have two children, who are ages 12 and 10, and the contents of this blog posting are extremely embarrassing to them, at school. Their classmates can read it. Would you be so kind as to take this posting down, for the kids' sake?This is family business, and sad all around, and the kids deserve their privacy. Thanks, Annelise Barron

@George, I find this case morbidly fascinating (hence me coming across your blog in a Google search), but I must agree with Annelise here. Any good that you are hoping to achieve by publicizing this crazy story is definitely outweighed by the harm to her kids. Through no fault of their own, they got a terrible break ending up in the middle of this mess, and these embarrassing details shouldn't follow them for the rest of their lives by living for eternity on the internet. Do the right thing and take this down, or at least selectively redact portions.

I am not shaming any minors. I quote from the Mercury News, and that article will stay up even if I take this down. Are the kids not supposed to know that their parents had a child custody dispute? I doubt that anything I do will make any difference.